Everyone in the UK should know slave Mary Prince’s story

SOLD at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, from June 23-25. Review by Jon Lewis

Oxford-based actor and writer Amantha Edmead’s multi award-winning play SOLD, which picked up best performer for Edmead, and best supporting performer for Angie Amra Anderson at this year’s Offies, returned to sell out the Old Fire Station prior to touring to Chicago, WOMAD and a rural tour in Kent.

This is the first production that I have reviewed where I was involved in the production, pre-pandemic (working on the Arts Council grant application, strategy and evaluations) but the production is very different now to when I last saw it in 2019 at the Old Fire Station. Because I have not been involved since the pandemic began, and because I was not part of the artistic team, I thought it would be interesting for the readers to see an insider’s review.

The production is a collaboration between Kuumba Nia Arts (mourning its inspirational co-director John Sailsman from covid this year) and Unlock the Chains Collective, whose leader, Euton Daley (ex-Pegasus Theatre chief executive) directs. Both companies have a shared mission to perform using authentic African creative styles – drumming, language, song, movement, dance, poetry, beat and costume – as well as draw on the spiritual and ancestral connections to today’s audiences. Anderson’s drumming throughout the performance provides a soundtrack that is both an aural wonder and a dialogue with the gods of West Africa.

Edmead plays all the human characters in SOLD, which is initially set in Bermuda where Mary Prince is given as a slave to a girl her age. The audience follows Mary’s brutal experiences as she is sold, and re-sold, to slave owners who cripple her body with inhuman beatings and daily tasks.

Daley has constantly refined the direction so that now, Edmead intones many lines with a musical beat that’s reminiscent of the call and responses in gospel meetings, performance poetry and rap. Her movement is more expressive than three years ago, a masterclass in shapeshifting to the incessant beat of the drum.

The striking set contains hanging nooses and coils of ropes symbolising the umbilical cord linking the present to the past as well as suggesting the hangings of slaves for disobedience (designer, Nomi Everall). Despite the bestial behaviour of the British slave-owners, whose wealth flowed back to fund many Oxford colleges, Prince’s story is a positive one. Her subsequent autobiography shamed many in the 1820s to finally abolish slavery, and Edmead’s powerful performance makes a strong case that everyone in the UK should know Prince’s story. It’s a great show, uniquely told, most recently headlining the Bermuda Festival, bringing Mary Prince’s story home. I feel proud to have helped in SOLD’s journey to the stage.